House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) is working to consolidate the votes to be elected Speaker of the House, with at least some of the roughly 20 holdouts who were refusing to vote for him now committing to back him on the House floor.
But he is now coming under scrutiny for his actual record, with Aaron Blake of The Washington Post outlining his thin list of tangible accomplishments since being elected to Congress.
"Critics of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) have increasingly pointed to this — most notably the fact that he has yet to get a bill signed into law since being elected in 2006," wrote Blake, pointing to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who said, “House Republicans have just elected a speaker nominee who in 16 years in this Congress hasn’t passed a single bill.”
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"Legislation isn’t the only measure of a member of Congress, and that statistic could be characterized as misleading ... But it’s not the only data point that suggests Jordan would come into the job from a very unusual position," wrote Blake. For example, "The most oft-cited data on legislative success comes from the Center for Effective Lawmaking, a joint project of Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia. It tracks not only bills that become law, but bills that get some kind of traction, along with how significant the bills are."
On the CEL scorecard, Jordan "has ranked in the bottom five among House Republicans each of the past four Congresses," and it doesn't list a single bill he co-sponsored getting any advancement even in committee.
He also ranks near the bottom on the Bipartisan Index, which measures how often a member's bills get co-sponsors from the opposite party.
Asked for comment, Jordan's office has listed 64 bills from other members that he co-sponsored which eventually became law, and noted that, among other things, he helped craft a major border security bill that just passed the House — but that bill stands no chance of passing the Senate.
In fact, Blake wrote, one of the only significant things Jordan actually got passed was the resolution creating the House Judiciary Committee’s Select subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government — the body created on pure party lines to investigate people investigating former President Donald Trump, and which has been panned as ineffective by legal experts.
"The fact that this is Jordan’s biggest legislative contribution would seem to speak volumes about what the GOP is prioritizing now," concluded Blake.
